Mix Content and Channels for Lead Generation.

One of the most frequently asked questions is how to generate leads and nurture leads using social media channel.

I know there are a lot, yes I mean a lot of ideas and techniques to do that, but let me explain you mine, that is actually working good.

Who’s your audience?

Define your target group and what they exactly need in the domain/area you are familiar with. Let’s say you are targeting programmers, because this will be the case I will use to describe the workflow.

What do they need

To have fun

To know what is going on in the IT world

To get in touch with people like them

To save time

To earn money

Channel: Content

Focusing on the same target group you will know that programmers often don’t have time to browse the web every hour or to follow most of the channels you are following. They are busy as well and open for knowledge in the same time.

Create a content remix:

Fun:

Xkcd

Pinterest (use your own board there to collect funny pictures)

News:

Blogs, mainly blogs

Dzone

Hacker news

Reddit

Get in touch:

Twitter

Facebook

Meetup

Newsgroups

Money:

Job ads

Affiliate programs

Uniqueness:

Try to find unique blogs and content that are often out of the main stream. Usually this is more interesting and useful for a programmer than an article published on mashable for example.

Create your own content – interviews and product articles – this is a lead generation effort.

Regularity

Create the remic whole week, but publish it on a certain day of the week. For example – IT Tuesday.

Usability

Create a website/simple landing from where people can subscribe for the notification for a new edition of your mix and can share the page with friends or colleagues.

Make sure your website and content are accessible from any mobile device, even Amazon Kindle. (it’s easy)

The good news is you don’t have to create a lot of content in order to get this stream popular.

Channel: Social media

Spread the word about your channel via social media and this will bring you success. Publish some of the news like a teaser in twitter and facebook for example.

Track everything – clicks, visits, user behaviour, conversions.
If you are brave enough to do this every week for 2 months you will see how more and more subscribers are coming back to you, because they trust you and now is the time to …

Convert and nurture.

Once you have a lot of views of your content you will have a lot of subscribers? Why? Well I will reveal you a secret.

You can give them more than valuable content and trust:

Once a week or month you can give them a book or a huge discount and track the engagement.

Lead them to join your company website/product trial or use any other technique to convert them to an opportunity via funny and interesting white-paper or a piece of code they can execute in order to join.